


a two way mirror, clouded with dust

by JamieGaylePiff



Series: Danger Days [3]
Category: Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys - My Chemical Romance (Album), My Chemical Romance, The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys: California (Comics)
Genre: Gen, It/Its Pronouns for Agent Cherri Cola, Post-SING (Music Video), Pre-Canon, Pre-Fabulous Killjoys Comic, Trans Bottled Andromeda, Trans The Girl
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-01
Updated: 2021-03-01
Packaged: 2021-03-14 01:47:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29785311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JamieGaylePiff/pseuds/JamieGaylePiff
Summary: She's seen her file before. The quick version, at least.The only accurate thing in it is her age.
Series: Danger Days [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2189328
Comments: 12
Kudos: 13





	a two way mirror, clouded with dust

**Author's Note:**

> Hi besties, I'm back and with another fanned fiction! This time it's about... our best friend, Andie! But like, actually from her POV this time. Wow!
> 
> As usual, I am referring to The Girl with my headcanon name for her, which is Bottled Andromeda. I am also using my Cherri Cola backstory, which is that 2 years post-SING, it reassumed the Gary Levko identity to spi on BL/I.
> 
> Content warnings for this fic: Misgendering. It's not a spoiler, just that Andie's file has her sex in it, and it's very jarring to her, so she spends a bit thinking about that.

She looks at the papers Cherri's just handed her.

"That first part's the abbreviated file," it explains. "Handed out to basically anyone on active duty. Everything else is the full version. Only S/C/A/R/E/C/R/O/Ws get access to it."

"Is that what you are?" She asks, half joking, half… she doesn't know. Upset, maybe. It's been years since she's seen Cherri Cola, and she hadn't exactly been very happy with it when they'd left each other.

It doesn't answer. She doesn't really want to know that the answer's yes, anyway, even if it is a spy.

She sits on the sand, hard. Cherri reorients itself so that its shadow is cast over the sheaf in her hands, a gesture she appreciates as much as she's annoyed by it.

"It's still calling me  _ The Girl _ ."

"Isn't that your name?"

Oh, yeah. "Not for years, man. It's Bottled Andromeda now. Andie. Was more surprised about the, y'know..."

"Oh." A beat. "Cool name."

"Thanks. Came up with it myself."

Not exactly true. Andie had been talking to a pornodroid-turned-drag-king in Four when it came to her, and she credits him with the name. That's a bit too much to explain offhand, though.

She scans the rest of the page quickly. The information's all old, outdated, exactly how she wants it. 

"Thanks, Cherri Cola."

She tells herself it won't bother her.

"Just my job, Bottled Andromeda. Here's the patrol routes for hunting season, too. They're getting it into their heads that they're being too predictable."

* * *

_ Name: The Girl _

_ Height: 4'8'' _

_ Weight: 90lbs _

_ Age: 19 _

_ Complexion: Fair _

_ Hair: Auburn _

_ Sex: Male. Presents as female. _

_ Skills: N/A _

* * *

She's an adult. Nobody calls her  _ The Girl _ anymore, not if they want her to respond. Campfire stories are one thing, but she isn't that little girl that ran with the Fab Four anymore. She's  _ Bottled Andromeda _ , for the Witch's sake.

She's not a little kid anymore.

* * *

She'll be the first to tell you she's short. But she's not  _ ten _ , and she's not  _ ninety pounds _ . Nobody weighs themselves out here, except she knows that when she presses her fingers up against her ribs, there's a comfortable amount of squish.

* * *

She remembers being ten and seeing a cruel man carve a half-smile into Fun Ghoul's face after clawing out Jet Star's eye. She remembers being dragged into the unbeating black and white heart of the monochrome monster and not leaving for long enough that the ugly Cheshire grin had scarred over, smooth and white.

Missing the sun for that long would make anyone's complexion "fair". 

She remembers hating how pale she'd gotten. She remembers, a week after getting out, that she'd sat in the sun long enough that Cherri had been worried about sunburn, and then after she'd brushed that off, cancer. She hadn't listened to it, though.

Her skin is now back to a deep brown, just as it should be. 

* * *

Just before that ugly day with the scars and the missing eye, Fun Ghoul had helped her bleach her hair. Xe hadn't been very good at it, so it'd turned out orange in some places and brown in others. Party Poison had laughed at Ghoul and promised her that just as soon as her hair recovered a bit from the bleach they could dye it pink. Next time, though, she should ask _ them _ for hair help.

She'd been dead set on pink being her color, back then.

There hadn't been a next time, of course. Her hair had stayed that ugly orange color for months, even after she got the chance to change it. She'd wanted to cut it off, but she'd ended up getting help from Desert Rose to properly bleach it.

Her hair's yellow-white now, undyed, held in bulky box braids. She usually wraps them with rainbow fairy lights to add some color without feeling like she's choosing a ghost to favor.

Definitely not auburn, though.

* * *

Andie thinks that  _ "Male. Presents as female. _ " should probably bother her the most, out of everything. It does, in a way, but not in the dysphoric way that she thinks it might affect other girls.

She was born in the desert. Raised in it. Raised by  _ Party Poison,  _ of all people . In simple terms, she has a penis, sure, but she doesn't remember ever thinking it made her a boy. She remembers being  _ the Kid _ for a while, until someone called her a girl and she liked it. Then she was  _ The Girl _ . Then, years later, she picked a real name.

It's odd to think of her body as masculine. If it's hers, shouldn't that make it feminine? She remembers a boy from the City saying something like that about himself but switched around. The way he'd phrased it, it had sounded so radical to say that any body belonging to a man was biologically male, even if it was something that had been obvious to her all her life.

She just knows that she's not male. 

If anybody's male, it's Dr. Death Defying, with the cracked and faded blue-pink-white-pink-blue sticker on his cane. If anybody's male, it would've been the Kobra Kid, with the crescent moon scars on his chest that she remembers him being so eager to show off as soon as he got the bandages off. If anybody's male, it's that City boy who shouted out old ideas and made them sound new again.

Not her, though. Never her.

* * *

"What's up with you?" Desert Rose complains. "You've been, like, moody ever since we met up with Pepsi-Cola."

"'We'? You were sleeping!"

"Fine, fine, since  _ you _ met up with Cola. You okay, though?"

It's a week before the first drac hunting party's scheduled to go out. The two of them are the first to be at the hunting camp, since they have the patrol routes from Cherri. It's one of the safest places to light a fire at night, so Andie's done that. 

She looks at Desert Rose, really looks at them. Sees how they're taller than her, but not by much. Looks at their bright pink hair that they've repeatedly assured her would normally be a mohawk, except they had other things on their mind than gelling it up, even though she  _ knows _ that they always used dish soap. Looks at their perpetual stubble, their heart-shaped earrings, their banana yellow jacket. Their embroidered pants and unstylish work boots. 

Thinks,  _ If I took a picture of them right now and passed it off to a stranger, they'd be able to make a better profile of Rose than whatever idiot made mine _ .

Says, "I just realized that the company that's supposed to know everything about everyone doesn't know a single thing about me, and I don't know how to take that."

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Find me on Tumblr at jg-piff :3


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